July 2022 - tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Bridges and Hs_vanguards
by dmz21 12 Jul '22

12 Jul '22

Dear readers, During the last week the bytes/second of my bridge dropped to 20% of its common usage over the past months, while the average number of connected clients stayed the same (according to metrics.torproject.org) I'm also seeing a dozen circuit connections with purpose Hs_vanguards in nyx recently, which are not familiar to me. Under-utilization of my bridge is not a problem to me, but maybe someone can tell me whether the two are related? Maybe it's an issue at my end or my hoster or maybe a generic issue of the tor network currently? Or maybe it's all normal? Thanks and best regards

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We're trying out guard-n-primary-guards-to-use=2
by Roger Dingledine 11 Jul '22

11 Jul '22

Hi folks, As part of the hackweek projects ( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/hackweek/ ), some of us are thinking about simple tweaks we can do to tune the network to better handle this month's traffic overload. The long term answer is to try out proposal 327: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/327-pow-over-intro… because we think a lot of the overload has to do with people sending way too many intro cells to some onion services, and giving the onion services ways to defend themselves is the only real answer. But while we're thinking about implementing that proposal, one of our earlier steps is to set the guard-n-primary-guards-to-use consensus parameter from 1 to 2. Now that it's taken effect (you can watch the votes at https://consensus-health.torproject.org/#consensusparams ), this change means that clients will now choose between two guard relays by default (rather than just one) when building circuits. This is potentially a big deal, since it puts us into a different point in the performance vs safety tradeoff space. Here is some reading for why we originally moved down to 1 guard by default: https://blog.torproject.org/improving-tors-anonymity-changing-guard-paramet… https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~hoppernj/single_guard.pdf But on the theory that some guards are way overloaded right now and some aren't, giving clients two bites at the apple might make a dramatic improvement in terms of reliable and consistent performance. There is also some argument in favor of using two guards anyway. One reason (explained more in proposal 291) is that there are already some edge cases where clients use their second guard. And also, in the glorious future, we will want to be using multiple guards because we have switched to the multi-path Conflux design (proposal 329) -- though we're not there yet. So: I am giving you all here some early warning, in case you see anything odd on the network when we make this change. Let us know if you do. :) --Roger

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Is ExoneraTor still alive?
by Christian Pietsch 07 Jul '22

07 Jul '22

Dear all, ExoneraTor is/was useful for showing law enforcement authorities that a given IP address acted as a Tor exit relay at a given day. Unfortunately, ExoneraTor seems to be offline. This page does not work at all, returning an HTTP 503 error immediately: https://exonerator.torproject.org/ This page returns the following error whenever I submit an IP address: https://metrics.torproject.org/exonerator.html | Server problem | | Unable to connect to the database. Please try again later. If this problem persists, please let us know! Can it be revived? Can I help? Cheers, Christian -- Christian Pietsch volunteering for Digitalcourage e.V. https://digitalcourage.de/ – Swarm support: https://digitalcourage.de/swarm-support – German BigBrotherAwards: https://bigbrotherawards.de/

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